


Fractures, Imagined and Real

by tealmoon



Series: Yesterday's Dreams [3]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Abusive Sibling Relationships, Alternate Universe - Underfell, Alternate Universe - Underswap, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Medical Abuse, Minor Original Character(s), Panic Attacks, Past Child Abuse/Neglect, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-04
Updated: 2016-04-11
Packaged: 2018-05-31 03:06:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6452962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tealmoon/pseuds/tealmoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was sick, trapped in an unfamiliar place, and his brother was gone, but at least he wasn't alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

These people fed him so much that Sans was starting to wonder if they were trying to poison him. His counterpart presented him with a tray for what felt like the millionth time, and he tried to untangle himself from a mountain of blankets to sit up on the couch. It felt like all he had been doing over the past three days was sleep or wish he was sleeping. If he had been at home, Papyrus would have dragged him to work or threw him in the snow by this point, but they just let him do it.

“Red, please, you have to at least try to eat something.” The insistence backed up his poisoning theory, but he took the bowl anyway. He never was hungry after magical exhaustion, only nauseated and tired. Even when he wasn’t sick, he never ate this much, unless it was mustard. He took a sip of broth: salty as hell, but at least it wasn’t tacos, which this Sans made with as much fervor as Papyrus had made pasta, if not with the same skill.

With his twin standing over him, he managed a few more swallows before he started to feel disgusting. He had learned his lesson from yesterday, when he had thrown up dinner twenty minutes after trying to eat it. Sans wondered if they would force-feed him at this rate.

Feeling another cough coming on, he hurried to set down the bowl before it could spill. It must have been from laying in the snow all night—even for a skeleton, that wasn’t healthy. When he finally pulled his hand back from his mouth, it was covered in maroon traces of magic, and there was probably more on his teeth. The Fake Papyrus had pushed cup after cup of weird flowery tea into his hands over the past few days, but it did little to ease the coughing.

“I really don’t think he’s getting better,” Other-Sans called over his shoulder, to where his brother was messing around in the kitchen. “Maybe we should go to the clinic? This is starting to worry me.”

Sans stared up at him, gears slowly turning in his head. This guy seemed to talk twice as fast as he could process the words, and he couldn’t figure out if he was supposed to reply, or how. With a displeased huff, he dragged Sans to his feet and pulled off one of his long gloves to press his hand against Sans’s skull. His phalanges were so pleasantly cold that Sans didn’t even twitch at the touch, which ended way too soon.

“Papyrus, are you even listening? I think he has a fever too, we really need to go. Hurry it up in there!” Fake-Papyrus finally emerged from the kitchen and Sans started to wonder if this weird, squishy version of himself was actually the boss. Maybe the orders and the beatings were on hold because he was there as a potential witness. He didn’t look particularly beaten up, especially in comparison to Sans, but his hoodie could have been covering up any number of injuries, or maybe he was better at healing magic.

“It’s too cold for you to just go out in that,” Other-Sans said. “I know you don’t want a different scarf, but maybe another coat?” He couldn’t help but reach up to touch the shredded scarf around his neck, which he hadn’t taken off since they had washed it. Fake-Papyrus came back a few minutes later with a hoodie identical to the one he wore, if a little more threadbare, the orange not as bright. It was big enough on Sans that it fit over his jacket without a problem, nearly falling to his knees. Before he could start to overheat, Fake-Papyrus flipped his hood up and they pushed him out the door.

After spending so many days inside and having slept through his arrival, Sans hadn’t gotten to see what this Snowdin looked like. It seemed brighter, the snow was cleaner, and the buildings didn’t look as ravaged. He looked over his shoulder at where Grillby’s would have been, but they were already moving on, and it was hard to recognize anything past the wind and falling snow. There were people outside, not fighting, just talking or working. They glanced his way as the brothers pushed him along, and it was becoming clear that he was the only one with unhealed injuries, a battered and sharp-edged outsider. He tried to duck down into his hood a little more as they walked across town, Other-Sans’s arm looped in his and Fake-Papyrus’s hand on his shoulder, probably in case he tried to run for it.

They led him to a nondescript house a few minutes away. “It’s split between the shop and the clinic—Snowdin’s such a small town that we don’t need a hospital like the Capital has,” Other-Sans told him. A bell over the door chimed as they walked in, and the woman at the counter looked up. “What can I do for you boys?” She squinted at Sans, and he looked away, staring at the shelves of canned food around them.

“Is she in? Oh, and we’re probably going to need some medicine when we’re done,” Other-Sans said, gesturing to the other room, and his volume was starting to make Sans’s head pound.

“The doctor took a late lunch, but I can text her…” Anything else she said was eaten up in a wave of static, and Sans staggered back to the door. He fumbled at the doorknob, but it felt like his hands had gone numb, unable to move properly. His vision started going black at the edges, tinted red as the dregs of his magic flared up. The Doctor was coming. They had brought him back to the Doctor, when he thought that he had been free and safe, and there would be pills and injections and scalpels, in his bones and his Soul—

His feet went out from under him, and he collapsed to the floor, clawing stripes down the door as he fell. Everyone was talking above him at once, but none of it registered. When someone tried to pick him up, he started thrashing, but his body felt so heavy, and he only managed to get a mouthful of fabric when he bit down on the person’s arm. They managed to pin his wrists with one hand and heaved him up in the other arm. _Those hands were bones, it was the Doctor, the Doctor had him._

He went limp as he was carried through a doorway, mostly because he was starting to lose feeling in his legs, while his hands no longer existed, and his arms were an afterthought that he could barely twitch. Sans was put down on a table, and he curled up a little on his front, to keep his ribcage and Soul out of reach. He was going to die and he wasn’t ready, even though he had spent so long thinking about it and knowing it was going to come.

“Red?” It took a minute for him to hear anything over his ragged panting, and a minute more to actually recognize it as someone calling to him. _Red,_ not _Subject 27N_. “Red, can you hear me?”

“What happened?” An unfamiliar voice.

“Dunno, he just flipped out…” And that was Papyrus? But Papyrus was dead… “Red, say something if you can understand me.” He managed to gasp something unintelligible. “What’s going on?”

“The Doctor, I don’t—I don’t want to—please—" He wasn’t sure what string of words would be enough to stop them, and they were all muddled in his head anyway. The Doctor was going to kill him, and He knew how to make Sans’s single HP last for a very long time, and even if he could teleport, the Doctor would only follow…

“No one’s going to hurt you, Red.” Someone briefly put a hand on his back, and the touch stung even through all those layers of fabric. He shrieked, pressing himself further into the table to try and get away, and they retreated. “Keep taking deep breaths, okay?” Sans wanted to scream at them for drawing this out, trying to get him to breathe when it felt like all he could do was cough until his ribcage collapsed, but he gasped in air as best he could. Sometimes the Doctor was a little less cruel when he followed orders.

“Slower than that, Red. Inhale for five seconds, exhale for six.” They began counting out, and he tried to obey, past the hacking cough that sprayed discolored magic across the table. It felt like hours before his mind cleared and he managed to uncurl and sit up, wiping at the sweat on his skull with a hoodie sleeve. It was just the skeleton brothers and a bunny monster, no Gaster in sight. There weren’t any needles set out, or mysterious liquids and pills he would have to take, or surgery tools to cut him open for his bone marrow. The table didn’t even have any restraints on it.

“Feeling a little better?” The bunny healer (not a doctor, he told himself) gave him an appraising look. She didn’t look like a doctor, no lab coat or anything. “Now, what can I help you with, aside from your panic attack? That crack in your skull?”

He flinched and wondered if it was too soon to curl back up. “I’m sorry, I—" He started coughing again, his entire body shaking with the force of it, splattering more magic over the table and himself before he could clap a hand to his mouth.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, wiping down the table with some sort of disinfectant. “You’re hardly the first anxious monster to walk in, nor the worst. I don’t think I’ve seen you in Snowdin, though.”

Fake-Papyrus had brought him a little paper cup of water, and he was in mid-drink when she spoke, slopping some of it down his front and choking on the rest. Luckily, Other-Sans chimed in. “No, Red’s from Hotland, actually, you know how those guys don’t do well with our weather. He didn’t bring a good enough coat when he came to visit. Now he’s got that cough, and maybe a fever.”

She gave him a sharp look, and his smile wilted away. “And his magic depletion?”

“He offered to help me with my training, and… we kind of overdid it.” He envied this guy’s skill at deception: he wasn’t shaking or stuttering or fidgeting, and he looked just as apologetic as the situation demanded without getting nervous.

She seemed to buy all of it. “Sans, I know you can be more responsible than that, honestly. Don’t welcome a person to our town then immediately get them sick.”

He couldn’t help but flinch as her magic flickered over him, but it was only to CHECK his status, which made her frown. “And here I thought Papyrus’s HP was as low as you could get; I’ve never met someone with only one before. Your magic is extremely low as well, I’m surprised you overextended it this much.” At her request, he stripped down so she could see his ribcage and SOUL, though it took a few minutes just to get each layer off with his arms trembling and exhausted, and the room was freezing. Fake-Papyrus moved toward him at first, to try and help, but he glared until he backed off. Pulling off the hoodie dislodged Papyrus’s scarf, but he put it back on, a last bit of defense. He struggled to make his Soul appear, trembling and a muddier shade of maroon than usual, and the effort felt like a generalized ache through his bones.

He jerked back as she moved to put her hand inside his ribcage. “I’m sorry, I should have warned you, but I’m only going to use healing magic on your Soul, that’s all. If you don’t want me to, you could take medicine to restore your magical equilibrium, but that would take longer and might be less effective.”

“It’s fine,” Sans managed to say through chattering fangs, hands gripping the edge of the table as she reached up into his ribcage and took his Soul into her paw. He waited for her to squeeze it or prod at it, but she just held it as her paw started glowing. It had been so long since he had seen healing magic: he couldn’t manage it himself, and if Papyrus could, he had done it behind closed doors. Her fur was warm against his Soul, and he felt some of his own magic start to trickle back.

When she finished there, she moved over to the cracks in his ribs and forearms, which looked a little better for the healing but still stood out against his bones, too old to fully remove. She lingered the longest over the crack in his skull, pouring more and more magic into it with apparently no effect. “I’ve had that one for a few years,” Sans said, mostly to get her to leave it alone. “I don’t think there’s much you can do.”

“You know, I could give you a cream or something to help seal this up, even if we can’t get rid of it fully. And… wait, hold still.” Her fingers moved lower, tracing the edge of his eye socket. “There’s some dust here, did you damage—"

His hand shot up, closing around her wrist tightly and pulling it away, the tips of his fingers digging in. Although his magic was far from replenished, he used his blue attack, weighing her down enough that she wouldn’t be able to move faster than him. “D-don’t fucking touch it!”

She went silent and very still, though he was clearly hurting her, and he could see from the corner of his vision that the brothers were staring at him like he was some fucking bomb about to detonate, but he couldn’t look away from the few specks of his brother’s dust on her fur.

“Okay Red, I’ll leave it alone. Please let go of me.” Watching her carefully, he did, letting his magic disperse as well and she leaned away from him, rubbing at her wrist. “Still, if you have an injury in your skull, I do think we need to look at it. It could be dangerous in the long-term.”

“It’s—" What could he possibly say? ‘It’s not my dust, it belongs to my dead brother’? There was no good answer. “It’s f-fine, okay? Just leave it.”

She had a pinched look on her face now, as she stepped out of reach. “That should be all, then. My sister can get you some medicine, and one of you can come by in a few days to get the ointment for your skull. Let me know if things plateau or get worse by next week.” She had started talking over him to Fake-Papyrus instead, but he really didn’t care anymore. They had been in there for a half hour, tops, and he was exhausted. He managed to redress, and Other-Sans half-carried him out the door, while his brother lingered behind, presumably to buy that medicine. The wind had picked up, driving everyone inside, and it was easier to walk without people looking at him, measuring him up.

When they got back, he lurched back to the couch, what he had started thinking of as his place in the house, and collapsed there as his counterpart paced around the living room, giving him unsubtle glances of…what emotion was that? These people were impossible to read.

“You should apologize to her when you feel better,” he said finally, turning to face Sans.

“What?”

“You attacked her when she was just trying to help you! Of course you have to apologize!” The door clicked open, and Fake-Papyrus came in, stone-faced and grim. Sans braced himself, wondering what was coming next: yelling, a slap, something much worse.

“Red, we need to talk about this.” Fake-Papyrus set down the bag he was carrying and moved closer, and Sans froze, fists clenched around his sleeves. He reached out to touch his skull, fingers running along the crack, and Sans expected them to dig in, but he just stroked along the diverging lines, from the crown to the back of his skull. His hand was warm. “If you’ve got some structural damage in your skull, something that’s causing it to dust from the inside, we need to deal with it now, before it kills you outright.” His lazy drawl had hardened to the point that he almost sounded like the real Papyrus, and Sans struggled to focus on the words past the tone.

“I told you, I’m fine. It… it’s not my dust.” Other-Sans looked like he was going to be ill, his pupils shrinking to pinpricks in his sockets.

“Red, you’re going to have to say more than that. How could you possibly get someone else’s dust in your head?”

They weren’t going to let up, were they? “It’s not like someone held me down and poured dust into my skull.” (It wouldn’t have surprised him if that had actually happened to someone in his Underground, though.) “The dust is my brother’s, okay? Papyrus couldn’t have a funeral, so I brought him with me.”

Other-Sans had been unwrapping the medicine as he talked, and it fell from his hands and onto the carpet with a muted thud, luckily still sealed. Both of them stared at him, and he pulled the blanket around him a little tighter.

“You couldn’t just put it in a jar?” Fake-Papyrus asked weakly, dropping down beside him on the couch. “Shit, Red, I’m sorry, we didn’t know…” His counterpart climbed onto the couch as well, perching on the arm rather than trying to squish in on his other side.

“How could you have known? And I wasn’t thinking straight, okay? You try making rational decisions when your brother’s been killed and they’re coming for you next.”

“But you can’t just walk around with someone’s remains in your head—"

“ _Why not_?”

Other-Sans flinched but kept talking. “Well, now that you’re here and safe, you could give him a more permanent memorial. What do people do where you’re from?”

He shrugged. “We don’t have any traditions; people just do whatever they want with dust. Papyrus never told me what he wanted done with his. He thought he was immortal.”

(Once, when Sans had been drunk and Papyrus lenient enough to listen, he had begged his brother to spread his dust among the Echo Flowers, and to say something kind for them to repeat to him forever. Of course, both of them had assumed that sickly, weak little Sans would die long before Papyrus. When he was sober again, he cursed himself for being so sentimental, but Papyrus never brought it up again, and he thought the conversation had been discarded as so much drunken nonsense.)

The brothers exchanged a long look. “Well,” Other-Sans said, trying to smile (and there was an expression he could recognize, for once), “in this Underground, when someone dies, the people who knew them gather the photos that they and their loved one were in. The dust is divided up so everyone gets a little bit, that they put in the photo frame or album with the photos, so that the person lives on in those memories forever. Do you have any pictures of you and your brother?"

Sans fumbled for his phone, but his brief wisp of hope had already vanished by the time he opened his photo album. He only had a few sloppy photos for the rare times that Undyne demanded a report on vandalism and anti-Dreemurr graffiti. Nothing of Papyrus, nothing of himself. He shook his head, and his counterpart leaned over to gingerly hug him.

“We can figure out something else later, Red. For now, just take some medicine and rest, okay?” He could feel Fake-Papyrus loop an arm around him as well.

When they offered him the bottle, he could feel his hands trembling with another wave of panic: memories of all the weird concoctions the Doctor had made him drink or even poured directly on his Soul when he clamped his jaw shut and tried to refuse. They poured out a tiny dose, and it didn’t glow or smoke or reek so badly that the smell alone chipped at his HP. He hesitantly sipped it down, and it tasted like the herbs Papyrus had sometimes put in his spaghetti.

He settled back into the blankets ( _his_ blankets), and listened to the snow against the windows, and they held him without saying another word.

           

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty frustrated with this one, but I got tired of fiddling with it. 
> 
> On another note, does Underswap actually have a set 'canon' for how it would actually play out if that was the game rather than Undertale? I'm having enough trouble trying to figure it out (mostly concerning Toriel and the 6 souls) that I might sloppily make my own AU of an AU, just so it'll make sense. It'll be semi-important for a minor plot point later. 
> 
> ._. I don't know how long this might get.


	2. Chapter 2

After the first day, he was able to eat half of a bowl of soup without it coming back up later, though he had been braced for it all night and dreamt of throwing up when he dozed off. On the second day, he managed to make a wisp of magic flare in his eye and kept it there until Other-Sans biffed him in the shoulder with a throw pillow and scolded him for straining himself.

On the fourth day, he had barely coughed at all and hadn’t slept through lunch, like usual. Fake-Papyrus gave him a scrubbed-out mason jar, and he hunched over it, exercising his regained magic by levitating pinches of dust out of his skull and into the jar. It was fussy, difficult work, but he kept at it while the TV blared at him. All these people seemed to watch was music videos (Other-Sans) and weird artsy romance movies (Fake-Papyrus). It was only a little better than the single program back home, and he barely paid attention to anything other than the growing pile of dust in the jar. It would be impossible to get all of it, but he liked the idea that he would still have a thin film of dust left in his skull, no matter how odd or morbid they thought it was.

On the seventh day, he led the two of them far enough from Snowdin that no patrol would ever stumble over them, early in the morning. (He didn’t know what the guards around here were like, but Sans wasn’t about to take any chances.) He originally wanted to spread Papyrus’s dust in the river, but they vetoed the idea. “Sorry Red, but people drink from that river, it wouldn’t be right.” So, instead, he went into the woods.

Fake-Papyrus had carried the shovel on the walk there, but he handed it over silently. Sans took off Papyrus’s scarf and nestled the jar in it so it wasn’t directly sitting in the snow, and he started to dig. It wouldn’t have felt right to use magic—he couldn’t honor Papyrus properly if he was being a lazyass. He had to shovel through a lot of snow before he could reach the dirt underneath, and he already had started to sweat. But he kept going, and they let him.

He didn’t need to dig very far—it wasn’t like a human burial. When he had reached down far enough to hit tree roots, that was enough. Sans had led them around the forest, looking for a tree that seemed healthy, one that was bigger than the ones around it. He knew that dust helped plants grow (Asgore had always bragged that his garden was so lush because he planted it in the dust of his enemies, the freak), so Papyrus’s dust could feed this tree. It would no doubt surpass all of the other trees, blessed by the Great and Terrible Papyrus.

He unscrewed the jar and tipped the dust into the little hollow he had made, and it felt…not perfect, but okay. Sans knelt down, careless of the dirt and snow grinding into his knee joints, bowing his head close to Papyrus. Even though they were standing back and might not have heard him, he lowered his voice to a whisper. “I love you, bro. Hope this is good enough. I’ll come visit you as much as I can. I’m sorry.” A few red-tinted tears fell down his cheekbone and into the snow, and he let them, sitting back on his heels.

By the time he stood up, the tears had dried as if they were never there at all, unless someone leaned in too close to see the faintest red smear against his bones. He filled in the tiny grave and stacked stones on top of it, in case someone tried to dig it up. It still looked disturbed after he shoveled the snow back onto it, but it was better than leaving it completely bare, obvious to anyone that it had been tampered with. He leaned against the tree truck and considered it for a moment before he began to carve into it, his claws strengthened with magic. He only needed a second to decide what to put there: a P in wingdings. The Doctor might have poisoned the signs for Sans, but Papyrus had thought it was elegant and sometimes signed his name that way. He fixed the tree’s position in his mind, knowing that he would teleport back to it in the future.

They both looked incredibly uncomfortable when he turned to face them, brushing the snow off Papyrus’s scarf and putting it back on. “Did you… did you want to say anything as a memorial?” Other-Sans asked. “So his memory will live on in us too.”

These weak, inverted people would never be able to properly understand Papyrus, but he thought about it, his jaw grinding a little. His brother was both an asshole, and the only monster Sans had ever fully trusted in his life, but he couldn’t say that. He and Papyrus had spent their whole lives trying to protect their secrets, even though he didn’t have much of a reputation to protect anymore.

“My brother was the coolest person I ever knew. He was going to be the captain of the Royal Guard; he was one of the top guards and definitely strong enough. He was a great leader, people listened to him.” Mostly because he shouted almost everything he said, but still. “He was so talented and shit that he should have left me behind, but he never did.”

“Of course not! He was your brother, he wouldn’t have done that!” Other-Sans wasn’t yelling for once (it was a funeral, after all), but he waved his hands around for emphasis.

“No, it’s like… When we were little, we were made to fight. There was only enough food for one, only one blanket, and if we shared we were punished. So when we got out, he could’ve abandoned or dusted me or done whatever. He could have…” Sans cut himself off before he accidentally blurted out something dangerous. “He didn’t need to stay with me, but he did.”

When the Doctor had died and the food started running out, Papyrus had been the only one to fight back and break out of his cell. The power had gone out and left the electric locks useless, so it only took a few bones to destroy the door. Lucky for him—he might have had more willpower than the rest, but he was just as starved and weak as them. He could have walked out on his own and never looked back, but instead he dragged Sans with him, the runt of the litter, weak and pathetic after so many failed experiments. He ignored the other cells, full of the rest of their siblings, some of them going to dust at the extremities or falling down. A few still had the strength to cry out to Papyrus as he passed, and even as an adult Sans believed it should have been one of them instead.

He had been so delirious that most of their escape was a blur in his mind, but he remembered curling up on the floor and watching Papyrus ransack the lab, looking for anything that even resembled food and shoving it past Sans’s slack teeth. It was possible that he had made it up: why would Papyrus feed him first when they had been taught to fight over every scrap? But he desperately wanted to believe it.

“Even when I started being useless, he took care of us both, made sure we had food and gold and clothes, shit like that.”       

“He called you useless?” Fake-Papyrus stared at him.

“I mean, _yeah._ When I couldn’t get out of bed or go outside or anything, ‘useless’ sounds about right. He did a lot of stuff to make me stronger, to make sure no one would fuck with me. I wish… I mean, he could have been a little softer, when we were alone and it was safe, but he already treated me so much better than I deserved!” He was starting to get frantic, sweat dripping off him again, though he was just talking. They didn’t get it, and he needed them to understand.

“I only have one HP, you know that. If he wanted to get rid of me, he could have, but he knew my limits and never went past them. Even when he got pissed off and hit me, he was always careful enough not to take it too far.”

“Red,” Fake-Papyrus said, very quietly. “Did your brother give you that crack in your head?”

He reached up automatically, to remind himself it was there, still dark and obvious against the bone, even after they bought him cream to put on it. “It doesn’t matter how—"

 _“Did your brother crack open your skull?”_ A wisp of magic floated out of the depths of his eye socket. It was orange, not blue, and he started rocking in place in anticipation of the attack. His magic hadn’t fully returned yet, and if Fake-Papyrus attacked the tree, how would he be able to defend it? Teleporting away was out of the question—he wasn’t going to leave his brother’s grave for this guy to destroy.

“Yes! Yes, Papyrus cracked my skull, and I deserved it, and it’s none of your fucking business!” His own magic flared into a red cloud around his head, ready to harden into bones.

“Please, Papyrus, let Red have his memorial, okay? What we think doesn’t matter right now.” Other-Sans grabbed at his sleeve, standing between them and throwing worried glances at them both.

“My brother got me this replacement when someone knocked my tooth out,” he said, tapping his gold fang with a finger, and they stared at him, wary and confused. “He used to let me sleep in his bed when I got night terrors. He always bought mustard for me, even when it was expensive, even though he said it was nasty. And he brought me books from the dump or stole them from the library. He hit me, and yelled, and kicked me out of the house a bunch, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t love me or I didn’t love him. You have no fucking idea.”

Fake-Papyrus went slack, the tension and magic ebbing out of his long limbs with a sigh. He pulled a cigarette pack from his hoodie and lit one, his brother huffing in disapproval. “You’re right. It’s not any of our business, and you don’t have to talk about it. Sorry, Red.”

He wanted this facsimile of his brother to leave, to shut up and stop judging them. “Just go then. If you’re going to be a dick about it, then fuck off.” As soon as the words left his mouth, he started shaking. Fake-Papyrus was going to punch him, or say he wasn’t welcome in their house anymore, or… or…

But he didn’t. He just shrugged and turned away, weaving in between the trees and soon out of sight. Other-Sans winced, watching him leave. (He needed a nickname. It wasn’t fair that he still had his identity and Sans had been reduced to ‘Red’. He considered ‘Cyan Sans’, to fit the color theme, but it sounded terrible. Blue Sans?)

“I’m sorry we upset you. If you want me to go too, I can, but I’ll listen if you want to talk more about your brother.”

“L-like what?”

“Happy memories? What you did together, what he liked.”

If they had been in Sans’s world, saying that would have been frivolous and soft at best, dangerous at worst. But here, the snow was clean, and people healed each other, and someone who wore his face gently took his hand, ready to let go if he flinched or pulled away. Papyrus was dead, but someone was offering to help carry the memories.

Sans took a deep breath, and Blue (unoriginal, yes, but fitting) nodded.

“My brother…everyone thought he was older, but we were only a few hours apart. I called him my big brother anyway, because it fit. He loved puzzles and cooking, and he wore heels all the time, because he liked to be the tallest person in the room, as if he wasn’t already enormous. He was the one who convinced me to get my degree, even though it barely meant shit, and he got me my sentry job. Back then, I could barely go outside because of all the people looking at me, so he found me a job that was 80% sitting alone in the woods.”

Once he had started, the words poured out of him, everything he could think of saying about his brother. He couldn’t help but want to say more, horrible memories trying to crawl out of his mouth. It felt like he was choking, trying to hold it all back.

“I wish things had been different,” Sans whispered, and Blue held his hand tighter.

           

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even more frustrated with this, but oh well. Funerals! Some semblance of friendship between Red and Blue! Terrible implications about the Fellbros' childhood! 
> 
> I probably need to plan these out in advance a little better, so I don't write myself into a corner.
> 
> (note: Is it possible to actually have wingdings text in a fic, I can't remember if I've ever seen it before. I don't know how to format it. Urgh, and how do you separate out end notes between chapters? I think I figured it out, but this is really fiddly.)


End file.
